Today I ended up laughing at myself again for fixating on the mempool: you think seeing a price spread is an “opportunity,” but a lot of the time it’s really just giving someone else (or a robot) an extra slice of fees. With those sandwich attacks, the most annoying part isn’t even getting squeezed—it’s that before you’ve had time to react, you’re already helping carry the sedan for someone else… Even I sometimes have moments of clumsiness as a fast-fingered trader: I rush in and run a flurry of operations, and during the afterward review I realize I didn’t contribute profit—I contributed liquidity and gas.

Arbitrage is the same way. In plain terms, it’s all about the information gap + execution—be a half-beat too slow and you turn into “on-chain charity.” Lately, the NFT royalties drama has also been pretty similar: creators want income, the secondary market wants liquidity, and in the end the friction costs in the middle are all paid by ordinary people. Anyway, I’m more cautious now: I’d rather do fewer trades; at least I shouldn’t always be the line item in someone else’s profit-and-loss statement. That’s it for now—keep waiting for the next “dead zone.”